Improving America’s healthcare cost consciousness

By Felix Salmon

August 25, 2011

Sharon Begley's wonderful Newsweek cover story on how less healthcare can mean better health, I'd urge you to do so now -- it's one of those articles where I just want to quote pretty much the entire thing. "
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If you haven’t read Sharon Begley’s wonderful Newsweek cover story on how less healthcare can mean better health, I’d urge you to do so now — it’s one of those articles where I just want to quote pretty much the entire thing. All manner of medicine, it turns out, from CT and MRI scans to antidepressants, have a habit of making people not better but worse.

The good news is that Big Medicine seems to be getting the message, and that’s having a real effect on Medicare cost inflation. Here’s Peter Orszag:

Partners HealthCare has used its health IT to be more selective about which patients should have diagnostic imaging tests, such as MRIs and CT scans. The cost to Medicare for imaging tests nationwide roughly doubled from 2001 to 2009. And such tests are not only expensive but potentially dangerous. Frequently imaged patients face an increased risk of cancer because of exposure to excessive radiation.

Doctors at Partners now order imaging scans through the computer system and are automatically queried about the patients’ characteristics. For each case, the software then provides an “appropriateness” score, reflecting evidence- based protocols for the image requested.

In a follow-up column, Orszag looks at another hospital, Mt Sinai, where he recently joined the board — a focus on reducing readmissions rates there has helped reduce its Medicare billing inflation to 2% — vastly lower than the 12% annualized inflation rate in Medicare costs that we’ve seen on average over the past 40 years or so.

The big question here, raised most promiently by Maggie Mahar, is why we’re seeing this unusual slowdown in Medicare costs right now. Mahar and Orszag say that a lot of the reason is the Affordable Care Act: a rare instance of a piece of legislation actually having its intended consequences. The act is designed to pay more for outputs and less for inputs — that is, to encourage the use of medical procedures only if they improve health outcomes, and to discourage them if they don’t.

I buy that. And if the healthcare industry broadly takes to heart the lessons of Begley’s article, then it’s easy to imagine a world where we can have our cake and eat it — lower healthcare costs (or, at least, lower healthcare-cost inflation) along with improved health outcomes.

The problem here is the incentives. From a public-policy perspective, there’s no doubt that getting doctors to order fewer harmful drugs and procedures is a really good idea. But from the point of view of the doctors and hospitals, they’re going to be leaving money on the table. Recent legislation includes some financial carrots and sticks, in a pretty well-designed manner.

Under the first stage of the HITECH Act, doctors who adopt electronic health records can receive incentive payments of as much as $44,000 from Medicare or $63,750 from Medicaid; hospitals can qualify for payments of $2 million or more. As of early August, Medicare providers had received $400 million in incentive payments for health IT, and much more is in the pipeline. Surveys suggest that while the first-stage incentives are available, at least two-thirds of American hospitals will adopt new systems.

Starting in 2015, the Medicare subsidies for adopting health IT systems are to be replaced by penalties for not doing so.

But it seems to me that the jury’s still out on whether these incentives are going to bend the famous cost curve over the medium to long run. Medical cost inflation is volatile and unpredictable, and downticks often just result in mean-reversion upticks the following year. The way to make sure these effects last is to get Begley’s message out to the population as a whole — and then to give them some amount of skin in the game when it comes to the cost of the procedures they do undergo. When people pay even a tiny amount of their direct healthcare costs, they become much more conscious of what those costs are. And the one thing this country really needs is much more cost-consciousness when it comes to healthcare.